Why “Convert” Is a Four-Letter Word to Jewish People

(And Why JD Hall’s “Smoking Gun” Missed the Target)

If you're planning mass evangelism in Africa, it's wise not to call it a crusade. Plenty of ministries that used to use that word now call it a campaign instead. They understand that in the mind of a Muslim, “we're coming to do a Christian crusade” doesn't mean good news is on the way — it means Christians are coming to kill Muslims. Because that's what the Crusaders did. They marched on Jerusalem and made war against Muslims in the name of Christ. I'm not here to argue the merits of the Crusades. I'm talking about evangelism. You never want to use a word that means one thing to you and something completely different to the people hearing it.

Which brings me to the word JD Hall hung his whole case on, sitting across from Tucker Carlson, claiming I'd agreed to stop sharing the gospel with Jewish people in exchange for getting Shelanu TV's broadcast license back. That's false. We never got the license back — period. We just moved our broadcasting to the Internet. His “smoking gun” was one sentence pulled from a press release, and it wasn't even something I personally wrote. Here it is, word for word:

“GOD TV and Shelanu TV have no intention of trying to convert Jews to a different religion, and we do not use any form of coercion. We understand the anti-proselytizing laws in Israel and honor them.”

Hall's whole case depends on your skimming past four words: “to a different religion.” We didn't say we have no intention of Jewish people meeting their Messiah. We said we have no intention of converting anyone to a different religion. Faith in Yeshua was never meant to pull a Jewish person out of Judaism and into some other religion. Peter believed that. Paul believed it. Simeon believed it. You're about to see it in their own words.

Let's talk about that word.

A Word With Two Very Different Histories

To a lot of Christians, convert is a beautiful word. I think of John Wesley. He'd already been a missionary in America, but he was still unregenerate — religious, but not born again. There's the famous story of him on Aldersgate Street, listening to someone read from Martin Luther's preface to Romans, when his heart, as he put it, was “strangely warmed.” He gained a profound, personal assurance of his salvation right there. He was converted. Not from one religion to another — he was already, technically, a Christian by religion. He was converted from death to life, from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God's Son (Col. 1:13).

That's what convert means to people in Wesley's tradition. It's a warm word.

But when a Jewish person hears the word convert, they don't feel their heart strangely warmed. They lock the door.

For most of Church history, Jewish people in Christian Europe were given a simple choice: convert or leave. In some cases, convert, leave, or die. That pattern hit its worst point in Spain and Portugal, where the Alhambra Decree of 1492 forced Spanish Jewry to choose between baptism and expulsion. Portugal followed in 1497 with forced conversions that gave Portuguese Jews no choice at all. In seeking a marriage with the Spanish Crown, King Manuel I ordered all Jews to either convert to Christianity or leave Portugal. He then closed the ports and forcibly baptized them. So, yeah, “convert” is not a word we use in Jewish evangelism.

What “Conversion” Actually Looked Like

Here’s what it actually looked like.

Jews who converted under compulsion were often made to prove it — eating pork was the classic test. Some conversion ceremonies of that era ended with the new “convert” reading aloud a confession that compared Judaism itself to witchcraft and vomit, and committing to cut off all social contact with other Jews, including family.

The Spanish and Portuguese Church had a name for these converts: marranos. Most historians trace the word back to “swine,” though the exact origin is still debated. Either way, the message was clear: you’re unacceptable unless you erase everything Jewish about yourself.

If a converso — that's another name for these converts — was later caught doing anything identifiably Jewish (resting on the Sabbath, refusing pork, or even just lighting Shabbat candles), the Church could have them arrested. Judaizing — doing anything Jewish — was heresy. Those who confessed, or were convicted, were paraded through the streets as public humiliation: stripped to the waist, sometimes forced backward onto a donkey, flogged by an executioner while crowds threw stones and jeered. Afterward, they wore the sanbenito, a penitential garment that branded them publicly for years. Spanish sources had a name for the whole ordeal: vergüenza pública. Public shame.

Let’s compare that with Paul in Acts 21. When he gets to Jerusalem, James and the elders don't ask him to prove he's left Judaism, as if that has anything to do with New Testament faith. Just the opposite — they ask him to join four men in a purification rite and pay for their Temple sacrifices, “so that all will know there is no truth in these reports about you, but that you yourself are living in obedience to the law” (Acts 21:20–26). Sabbath-keeping, Torah observance, Temple worship — ironically, these are the very things the medieval Church would later torture and burn Jewish “converts” alive for doing. In Jerusalem, they’re exactly the proof James wants the world to see in Paul.

In the rarest, most severe cases, a baptized Jew who went back to openly living as a Jew could be burned alive — supposedly to purify the soul through the suffering of the body. How merciful. Historians still argue about the total number of Jews executed by the Spanish Inquisition across its three and a half centuries — estimates run from the low thousands into the tens of thousands, and they genuinely don't agree on a number. But nobody argues about whether or not Jews were burned to death for the crime of returning to Judaism.

It's no wonder that when Jewish people are told to “convert,” their minds don't go to a warmed heart on Aldersgate Street. They go to the sanbenito. The vergüenza pública. A foreign inquisitor deciding whether lighting a Friday-night candle is a crime worth burning for. Losing your family, your name, your God, and maybe your life — for doing the exact things James told Paul to keep doing.

A Word the New Testament Doesn't Use That Way

The word “convert,” prosēlytos, is never used in the New Testament to describe a Jewish person coming to faith in Yeshua. When it is used, it is quite the opposite — Gentiles becoming Jewish proselytes. Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for traveling “over land and sea to make one convert” — a Gentile proselyte to Judaism (Matthew 23:15). The Pentecost crowd includes “both Jews and converts to Judaism” (Acts 2:10). Nicolas, one of the seven chosen to serve in Acts 6:5, is identified as “a convert to Judaism from Antioch.” The synagogue crowd in Pisidian Antioch includes “many Jews and devout converts to Judaism” (Acts 13:43).

So when Peter gets up on the day of Shavuot (Pentecost), and the Jewish-Yeshua-following movement is birthed — pay attention to what he actually says. He does not urge them to “convert to Christianity.” He says, “Men of Israel” (Acts 2:22). What they're witnessing, he tells them, was foretold by their own prophet Joel. Then he quotes Psalm 16: “You will not abandon me to the realm of the dead; you will not let your holy one see decay” — proof that the Messiah's resurrection was written into Israel's own Scriptures a thousand years before it happened. He moves to Psalm 110: “The LORD said to my Lord” — David himself, speaking of the Messiah's exaltation. The people are cut to the heart. They ask what they should do, and Peter tells them: repent and be immersed in water, a Jewish symbol of ritual cleansing now adopted as the way to express faith in Yeshua. There were mikva'ot (immersion pools) all over Jerusalem for people heading up to the Temple. It was quite the scene!

Thousands respond — all of them Jewish. Pilgrims from all over the Diaspora, in town for Shavuot, carry the news home with them. There is no ceremony renouncing Judaism. No one is forced to eat pork. We don’t read of a confession comparing their own faith to witchcraft. It'd be years before anyone even coined the word “Christian” — and when they did, it was probably a slur, used by outsiders in the Greek-speaking world, not something believers called themselves.

That pattern holds up through the rest of Acts. Two chapters later, Paul stands in front of the Sanhedrin and says, “I am a Pharisee” (Acts 23:6) — present tense, not past. Years later in Rome, sitting down with the local Jewish leaders, he never once asks them to convert to a new religion. “My brothers, although I have done nothing against our people or against the customs of our ancestors, I was arrested in Jerusalem,” he tells them (Acts 28:17). He's bound in chains, he says, “because of the hope of Israel” (Acts 28:20).

Go back further, decades earlier: old Simeon is holding the infant Jesus in the Temple, and he's not announcing some new religion arriving on the world stage. He calls the child “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel” (Luke 2:32). Anna the prophetess comes on the scene at that exact moment and prophetically “spoke about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem.” If Jews were expected to convert to a new religion and renounce Judaism, why is she connecting Jesus to the redemption of Jerusalem? And Paul says it most plainly of all: God brought salvation to the Gentiles specifically “to make Israel envious” (Romans 11:11). Not to erase Israel. To provoke her.

Back to Shelanu TV

If anyone was actually confused by a press release saying we don't try to “convert Jews to a different religion” — using the word in the loaded, Inquisition-shaped sense we've just spent this whole article unpacking — there was a simple fix: watch the station. Shelanu TV has had a separate feed with English subtitles at ShelanuTV.com for years. It doesn’t seem that Hall made any effort to see what we actually broadcast. Somehow he became convinced that we bowed the knee and compromised our faith for safety and acceptance—how did he put it? “But we’ve already established that Cantor would sell out his savior for 30 shekels.” Honestly, who writes such things, and with barely a morsel of evidence?

JD Hall also wrote of our ministry:

“Regardless of what language his station broadcasts in, he's still forbidden from targeting Jews. That means (for example) no programs highlighting Christ in the Old Testament, no apologetics series designed to reach the Jewish people, or no testimonies from Jews who have converted to Christianity.”

Had he actually taken the time to watch Shelanu TV, he would have seen that this is precisely what we do: we highlight the Messiah in the Hebrew Bible, we present Messianic Jewish apologetics, and we share testimonies of Jewish people who have embraced Yeshua as their Messiah. We avoid the phrase “convert to a different religion” because that’s not what happens when a Jewish person recognizes Yeshua. That wasn’t the case for Peter, John, James, or the three thousand who believed on Shavuot, and it isn’t the case today. Instead, we use the language of Acts 2: repentance, immersion, and Yeshua in the Hebrew Bible. Like Peter, we keep pointing back to the promises in the Old Testament about what the Messiah would do. Even Augustine — who believed Christianity had superseded Judaism — still maintained, in what’s now called his witness doctrine, that the Jewish people have an ongoing purpose: they preserve the very Scriptures that foretold the coming of the Messiah.

There's a second half to that press-release line that needs to be addressed: “We understand the anti-proselytizing laws in Israel and honor them.” Hall never tells his audience what those laws actually say — probably because it wouldn't help his story, or he made no effort to find out.

Israel's so-called Missionary Law is really just two sections of the Israeli Penal Code. Section 174 makes it a crime to offer money or some other material benefit to get someone to change religion. Section 368 makes it a crime to persuade or encourage a minor to change religion without both parents' consent. That's the whole law. Preaching, teaching, broadcasting, ordinary evangelism among consenting adults — all of that stays completely legal in Israel.

So yes, we honor that law. Gladly. We don't target minors. We've never offered money or gifts to entice people to believe — that is not even faith. The gospel doesn't need a bribe attached to be true — if it did, it wouldn't be worth sharing in the first place. None of this means we stop helping people who are in real need. We do that regularly. It's just never been conditioned on what someone believes, and it never will be.

Conclusion

All of the facts about what we actually do at Shelanu TV are readily available online. JD Hall did not even follow the story to see that we never did get our license back, and instead moved to the Internet. He operates on the false belief that we compromised and that we got our license back. Neither is true. All he had to do was follow the story. But it fits a greater narrative for him of being anti-Israel. He wants to be able to tell people that not only did Israel shut down our station, but we compromised to get it back. On Substack, he compared me to a Nazi sympathizer—which would make the Israeli government the Nazis.

I hope this helps you understand what Jewish people have been through over the centuries at the hands of so-called Christians. Yes, we seek to be as sensitive as possible to these realities as we share the gospel, but we do not compromise the message. Hopefully, JD will correct the record, but I’m not holding my breath.

P.S. I hope this doesn’t come across as something ‘personal.’ It truly isn’t. I see this as a teaching moment, an opportunity to share some important thoughts with a larger audience regarding the Jewish people and the gospel.